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We are excited to announce the upcoming publication of How Queer!, the highly-anticipated debut title from Faith Beauchemin. A short synopsis of the book is below. You can pre-order the book by clicking the image above. Pre-orders help us to sustain and continue projects like these. Reserving your copy of How Queer! today will go a long way toward helping us keep this book (and all of our other titles) in print. Thank you!

How Queer! gathers together fourteen autobiographical essays written not by sociologists or professional activists, but by ordinary bisexual, pansexual, and sexually-fluid people. These writers come from diverse backgrounds, but their personal narratives explore overarching themes of non-monosexual visibility, activism, confrontation with homophobia and religious bias, and endlessly double-edged experiences in the LGBTQ community.

These stories help bring understanding to anyone who wants to learn more about gender and sexual identity—whether to help define their own journey, grow their own awareness, or to build solidarity with one another.

As a complement to these narratives, Faith Beauchemin offers her own personal commentary in a series of reflective essays, which place the writers’ experiences in the context of broader movements for radical social change. Beauchemin argues that a trend toward bisexual erasure in LGBTQ activism is all too prevalent, and functions only to serve the interest of patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia.

In contrast to this trend of erasure, the stories collected in How Queer! subvert oppressive hierarchies by highlighting perspectives and revolutionary potential of people who refuse to fit neatly into the narrow categories of sexual identity that are imposed upon them at every turn.

Faith Beauchemin is a writer, activist, blogger, and independent feminist scholar from Detroit, Michigan, currently living in Anniston, Alabama. 

This Sunday, November 15, we will be tabling at the 2nd annual Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco! More information below:

City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus: 1125 Valencia, 10am-6pm

The Howard Zinn Book Fair is an annual celebration of People’s History, Past Present and Future. We gather together authors, zinesters, bloggers and publishers for a day of readings, panel discussions and workshops exploring the value of dissident histories towards building a better future. In the spirit of the late historian Howard Zinn we recognize the stories of the ways that everyday people have risen to propose a world beyond empires big and small.

The 2015 HZBF will take place on Sunday November 15th, 2015 and you are invited to be a part of it. Propose a reading. Rent a table to sell books or zines. Attend the over 40 readings and inspiring keynotes.

More information is available by following this link.

Hope to see you there!

Hammonds House Museum
Saturday, 10 October 2015
1:00 pm

503 Peeples St SW,
Atlanta, Georgia 30310

Hammonds House Museum and the Auburn Avenue Research Library, in collaboration with the Malcom X Grassroots Movement will host "Rethinking Black Resistance and Insurrection in the American South." 

This community discussion will examine the history of organized armed uprisings and spontaneous acts of insurrection by Blacks in the American South. Highlighting the vital roles they played in undermining the peculiar institution of slavery and strengthening contemporary struggles for equality, this discussion moves organized armed resistance and insurrection by Black communities from the overlooked historical margins to the center of U.S. History. 

Panelists include: 

- Dr. Akinyele Umoja, the Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University and author of "We Will Shoot Back" (http://nyupress.org/books/9780814725245);
- Dr. Modibo Kadalie, author of "Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the Struggle of Social Classes" (http://www.heatindex.us/2013/11/07/63);
- Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, authors of the recently published "Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South" (www.akpress.org/dixie-be-damned.html);
-Onyeka, British historian and scholar and the author of "Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their Presence, Status, and Origins" (http://mediadiversified.org/2014/02/12/its-time-to-talk-about-black-tudors/).

BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT THE EVENT

For more information, please visit the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/911005878955001/

We hope to see you there!

Sunday, June 14th 3:00PM

Hammonds House Museum
503 Peeples Street SW
Atlanta, GA 30310

Black Rebellion in Georgia: From the Ogeechee Insurrection to Black Power and Beyond

Hammonds House Museum, in collaboration with the Auburn Avenue Research Library will host "Black Rebellion in Georgia: From the Ogeechee Insurrection to Black Power and Beyond." 

This community discussion will feature a panel of scholars/activists who will explore historical acts of insurrection by Black communities in the American South, including the post-Civil War Ogeechee insurrection outside of Savannah, the 1966 Atlanta Summerhill neighborhood riots, and the 1977 Atlanta garbage workers' strike. This discussion will also examine the historical relevance of these struggles to recent uprisings related to police brutality and the political and economic disenfranchisement black communities. 

Panelists include Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, authors of the recently published Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, and Modibo Kadalie, author of Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the Struggle of Social Classes.

For more information, please visit the facebook event page.

Saturday, 4/18/15 (3:30-5:30 p.m.)
"Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye: A film screening and discussion with David Weir"
2015 NYC Anarchist Book Fair
Judson Memorial Church Assembly Hall
239 Thompson Street, New York City, NY 10012

This Saturday, David Weir (author of Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye) and the NYC Anarchist Book Fair present a screening of Jean Vigo's classic film Zéro de conduite.

The revolutionary ideology of Jean Vigo, the son of the celebrated anarchist Miguel Almereyda, brought about a revolution in cinema, as his 1933 film about a rebellion in a boys school shows. Zéro de conduite (Zero for conduct) conveys a sense of freedom that is not only political, but also artistic, making Vigo himself the first auteur of anarchism.

Copies of Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye will be available for sale at the Book Fair. For more information about the book, click here.

David Weir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is the author of Decadence and the Making of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), James Joyce and the Art of Mediation (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (State University of New York Press, 2003), Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890-1926, and American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). He is also the author of Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye (On Our Own Authority!, 2015), a study of the influential French filmmaker, Jean Vigo.

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Today is the 90th birthday of Eusi Kwayana, a revolutionary Pan-Africanist and independent socialist activist, teacher, and writer from Guyana. During the struggle for Guyanese independence, Kwayana was imprisoned by the British army in 1954. In 1956, he founded County High School (later renamed Republic Cooperative High School) in Buxton, Guyana. In 1964, he co-founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), an Afro-Guyanese socialist and anti-colonialist organization. In 1974, ASCRIA joined the Working People's Alliance, which is famously affiliated with another Guyanese revolutionary, Walter Rodney, who was assassinated in 1980.

Throughout his lifetime of social activism, Eusi Kwayana has advocated politics of direct democracy and working-class self-management. In his writings, he emphasizes that revolutionary change comes from among the ranks or ordinary people, through their own self-organization. His book The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (1972) documents an early 1970s bauxite miners' strike in Guyana during which striking workers organized themselves under the slogan "Every man is his own leader and we are leaderless" and directed their strike efforts through mass assemblies and direct-democratic councils.

Kwayana is also the author of several other books, including Next Witness, Scars of Bondage, Guyana: No Guilty Race, Walter Rodney: His Last Days and Campaigns, and Buxton Friendship in Print and Memory.

The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics was republished by On Our Own Authority! in 2012. That same year, Eusi Kwayana visited Atlanta to launch the book and deliver a talk at the Auburn Avenue Research Library for African American History and Culture (the top photo was taken during the event). The newest edition of the book is available for sale at the link below and includes an appendix of rare documents published by ASCRIA in the early 1970s.

It is impossible to summarize the life and significance of such a celebrated figure as Baba Eusi Kwayana within the confines of one blog post. We are honored to have worked with Eusi over the past three years and look forward to continuing that work into the future.

We are all sending you our warmest congratulations on your 90th year, Baba Eusi! As you are known for saying, Walk Good!

Kwayana, THE BAUXITE STRIKE AND THE OLD POLITICS on Square Market

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Today is the 144th anniversary of the Paris Commune! If you want to learn more about this fascinating moment in history, consider reading The Commune: 1871, a collection of classic anarchist writings about the Commune. The book summary is below: 

On 18 March 1871, enormous sections of the Parisian working class began a rebellion that shook the foundations of European society. Through this uprising, laborers seized direct control over their city, expelling their government and capitalist rulers. These revolutionary men and women declared Paris an independent municipality — a commune where they would directly and collectively manage their society through new institutions and voluntary associations of their own creation.

The Commune: Paris, 1871 is a collection of classic anarchist and libertarian-socialist studies of the Paris Commune, compiled, edited, and introduced by Andrew Zonneveld. This concise volume includes critical reflections on the Commune from such radical authors as Louise Michel, William Morris, Mikhail Bakunin, Petr Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alexander Berkman and Maurice Brinton.

Follow the link above or click here to order your copy of The Commune: Paris, 1871.

The editor of this book was recently interviewed by The Final Straw Radio. Below is a recording of that interview, featuring a lenghty conversation about anarchism, the Paris Commune, and its relevence to global social movement history. Enjoy!

Ida B. Wells was a teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor who led the most dynamic anti-lynching campaign in American History. Wells’s work exposes how the public murder and mutilation of Black bodies by mob justice stood side by side with a degrading culture based on racial stereotypes and strict gender roles that institutionalized fear in everyday life. In doing so, Wells challenged the intersection of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the meaning of “civilization” in the early 20th century.

In honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Ida B. Wells's Lynch Law in Georgia & Other Writings is available at a very low discounted price of $9.99 (that's 50% off!). 

Follow the link below or click here to order your copy! 

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"Decades ahead of his time, the film artist Jean Vigo was a one-man nouvelle vague. He was also a visionary who grasped cinema’s potential for embodying his political ideas—as demonstrated by David Weir in his acute and detailed appreciation of Vigo’s multi-faceted oeuvre, the best such to appear in English."

— J. Hoberman, author of Film After Film.

on Square Market

The son of Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist activist who died in prison, Jean Vigo kept faith with the politics of his father through his art. One of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history, Vigo gave aesthetic expression to anarchist ideology in four films: the city symphony À propos de Nice (1930), the sports documentary Taris ou la natation (1931), the medium-length Zéro de conduite (1933), and the feature-length L’Atalante (1934), currently ranked by the British Film Institute as the twelfth greatest film of all time. Although his career was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 29, Jean Vigo continues to be one of the most commanding figures in the history of cinema.

In this book, David Weir examines Vigo’s cinematic career in both the political and the cultural context of the interwar period in European history, taking stock of the ideological upheavals of the 1930s that plunged the continent into the horrors of fascism and war. Weir also explores Vigo’s relationship to other filmmakers of the period, such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné—all of whom, like Vigo, range across the leftist spectrum of the interwar years. In the end, Weir argues that, whereas L’Atalante and the other films have been mostly restored to something like their original condition, more work needs to be done to restore the original ideological meaning of those films.

Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye is NOW AVAILABLE from our online bookstore! Order your copy today at the link above!

DAVID WEIR is professor of comparative literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is the author of Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), James Joyce and the Art of Mediation (1996), Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (1997), Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (2003), Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (2007), and American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century (2011).

On Our Own Authority! will be tabling at the 2014 Carrboro Anarchist Book Fair. We are very excited to be participating again this year. Events will be held on Saturday, 22 November 2014, at The Nightlight Bar and Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Check out the postcard below for more information, or visit http://carrboroanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com/ 

See you there!